Geothermal Heating and cooling

Has heating or cooling burned a hole in your pocket? Or are you tired of paying loads of money to the propane man every year to get less and less heating out of your system?

We have a solution for you! GEOTHERMAL!

I am going to cover a few points about geothermal. First i want to give a simple explanation on how it works, Then i want to compare it to a forced air system.

HOW IT WORKS

A lot of people look at geothermal and their heads spin around at how complex the system can get. Geothermal is a simple system with complex ways of installing it. Meaning that if you do not know what your doing you can really create a head ache for yourself and whoever is living with the system. Geothermal has two main parts: 1- The heat pump loop and 2- The ground loop. Basically what geothermal is set  up to do is to take heat from the earth in the winter and put that heat into your home. Then in the summer it takes that heat from your home and puts it into the ground. Many ask how can that work because the ground is only 40-50 degrees year round. This part of the system is achieved by the heat pump. It uses refrigerant much like a refrigerator uses refrigerant to pull heat out of the inside chamber and displaces that heat to the outside air via the coils in the back. The difference between the heat pump in a geothermal system is that the compressor in the geothermal system is reversible. This would be like a refrigerator being able to heat and cool food by flipping a switch. Geothermal heat pumps take the refrigerant cycle and reverse it from heat to cooling mode thus creating a “heating” or “cooling mode”. It take the heat out of the ground and transfers that heat into the refrigerant in the heat  pump loop in the winter and does the opposite in the summer by taking the heat out of the system and put the heat into the ground.  Here is a few pictures of  the cycle to help illustrate the cycles.

Click on the picture to make it larger.

Here are a few of the ways we can install the ground loops on the geothermal system. We use two of the loop types to most. Those are the horizontal and the vertical loop designs. We can drill the vertical loops almost anywhere. They are usually drilled around 200 feet per ton of cooling. The vertical loops are trenched out 8 feet deep and around 150-200 feet long. Here are a few pictures of what they look like.

The horizontal loop

The vertical loop

The forced air comparison

So if we compare geothermal to forced air is when you can really see how geothermal just “makes sense” If we look at how a heat pump transfers heat through the refridgerant to the ground and vice versa. Geothermal’s heat transfer is not rated by % efficiencies because its is greater then 100% efficient. They way the describe the energy transfer is by using the coefficient of performance. This is pretty simple to have a COP of 2 that means that for every one unit of energy you put in you get 2 units out. So this would mean that the heat pump is 200% efficient. So you look at different heat pump manufacturers and quickly you will realize there aren’t a lot of heat pumps that operate lower then 2.5 if they are installed correctly. There are units that in some modes that can reach COP’s of 8 being 800% efficient. So already having a unit that has a COP of 4 in heating or cooling mode is already more then 4 times more efficient then the best 95% furnace around. This means a few things one you can have longer run times with the heat pumps variable speed blower and have more comfortable heat or cooling in your house instead of having heat swings. (meaning your house gets cold , the furnace turns on and then it gets really hot, it cools and you freeze then you sweat) having a more consistent low speed forced air is able to transfer a more even heat longer allowing you to be more comfortable in the summer and winter. This lets you have longer run times and it costs 4 times less money to operate. I will acknowledge that 95% furnaces do offer variable speed blowers and they can provide comfortable living but at the expense of your pocket. Especially in electric or propane markets locally. If your interested in looking to see how much you could save by installing a Geothermal heating and cooling system in your home here is a link to Hydron Module’s website that will allow you to enter your current system or a similar system and your local utilities and you can see how much you can save.

Hydron Module’s calculator

http://www.hydronmodule.com/calculator

In Cache valley and surrounding areas on Rocky Mountain Power and Questar gas here are a few of the fuel costs.

Questar per therm will vary between $.48 -$.68

Rocky mt power is $.019 cents a KWH

Propane varies we have seen an average of the past 12 months at $1.75 per gallon

Looking at that it will pretty much blow your socks off at how much you can save using a heat pump and a geothermal heating and cooling system in your home.  So if your looking at saving money on your heating and cooling bill geothermal heating and cooling is for you! Give us a call and set up an appointment and we can discuss different installation options for your home and area. Contact us on www.bridgeplumbing.net or call us at (435)750-0880